Posts Tagged "tumblr"

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” Who can recognise this quote? Everyone. That is because you might have read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen at least once, or at least you might have read the first paragraph which begins exactly with the quotation here above. If you didn’t read that book, you might have seen one of the many movies based on the novel, such as Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightely. And if you have not watched any movie, you might know Bridget Jones’s Diary which is a modern version of Pride and Prejudice, both in book and movie. At this point I think you may have understood my intention: I’d like to present you Austen’s world as a transmedia product. The interesting fact is that Jane Austen didn’t have any clue of what transmedia was, but she managed to create stories that are perfect to split through different media and to be kind of interactive, but we will focus on these aspect after some concrete examples. A couple of weeks ago I watched the mini series Lost in Austen. The protagonist is a girl in her twenties called Amanda Price. She is literally in love with Pride and Prejudice: the characters, the location, everything. She has read that book so many times that she feels like knowing the story as she has lived it. Jane Austen’s book is a safe place where she can hide. One night her boyfriend interrupts her reading and proposes to her with a can opener as a ring. She hides in her bathroom, and finds Elizabeth Bennet in her shower. It seems to be a portal between their two houses – and worlds – and the two girls exchange their lives. The story goes on with a lot of misunderstandings and accidents as you can imagine, but I don’t want to tell you the ending. Lost in Austen is composed of four episodes and was shown in 2008. In 2009 there was the announcement that there would be a movie too, but one of the producers died and there is no news about the...

Tumblr is one of the many blog sites available and popular on the Internet at the moment. One of its primary uses is to allow an ease of publishing for short content that can be reblogged or passed on to others to see. The website is easily a transmedia fiction platform, as blog posts allow the formation of transmedia fiction. A big part of this is because, similar to Reddit, the commentary on posts becomes an actual part of the post, while comments on many other blog and social networking sites can easily be ignored and can have little visible impact on the original story. The combination of multiple posts creates an shared story, often using multiple mediums. If you are not familiar with tumblr, tumblogs can be devoted to a number of subjects like cosplay portfolios, webcomics, art blogs, teaching history, cataloging sexism in comics, or just reblogging things you think are cool. Numerous professionals and companies also keep tumblogs to support their products and communicate with their fans and consumers (e.g., kellysue, gailsimone, kodanshacomics). Blog posts on their own can include a number of things, including pure text, music, videos, links to other websites, GIFs, pictures, fanart, fanfiction, and commentary of some sort on any of the above. As posts are reblogged and additions are made, they become a shared story and people can add any of the above onto the post. They can respond to a text post with links or add other commentary like their own personal experiences, answers to questions, questions for other writers on the post, jokes, puns, rants on the subject or a related subject, etc. Posters often take a video and GIF it with added text for humor or find the video a screenshot is taken from and GIF it. The array of options easily allows for multiplatform storytelling. Let’s look at an example post. I will be using screenshots of the post to focus on the different parts, but to see the whole post in better detail, just go here. This is a post that has been moving around tumblr for quite some time now. The original post is a group of pictures to show the RGB Colorspace Atlas by...